Curtains Close
by Unoriginality
Summary: Riza watches the last of her life tick away.


_When does the end appear?_

_When do the trumpets cheer?_

_The curtains close_

_On a kiss, God knows_

_We can tell the end is near_

When he stepped out of the council room with that exhaustive and disbelieving smirk on his face, she knew their lives as they knew it were over.

When she learned of their deployment to the North, she felt the ice cold breath of Death on the back of her neck.

And when he told her how he planned on destroying a monster, she knew for certain that the countdown to the end had begun.

She could hear the steady _ticktick_ of the clock every second of every day after that, following her, drowning out reality around her, numbing her thoughts to what they were going to do. If the Amestrian army had possessed any chimeras like the one that had been killed inside Alphonse's armor that could read minds, even that would not have betrayed their plans from her. Her mind was blank, listening to the constant heartbeat of time, counting each one that echoed against the inside of her head, waiting for that final one, waiting for the static silence when everything stopped suddenly.

Life turned itself upside down and inside out and yet somehow managed to feel very much the same those last few days. She still was constantly watching his back. Havoc and Fuery were both sent into proper states of confusion. Edward found himself in trouble again, and, as was his nature, the colonel had set aside his own plans to see how, if at all, he could help.

Listening to their conversation was the first thing to break the strange feeling of normalacy. She'd rarely heard Edward speak as much in such a bluntly honest and open fashion to the colonel, and on the same side of the coin, she'd rarely heard the colonel confess to his feelings on an issue so frankly. He'd always spoken between the lines so only those who knew him would understand, and she always understood. Edward was different, of course, so it was reasonable, she figured, that as their parting gifts to each other, they would reveal what they hadn't been able to before.

It was almost a privilege to be privy to that, she realized; both were men with many secrets to hide and little trust to give, but the knowledge that the reason for this conversation she was allowed to be witness to was because neither man figured they would walk away from where they were going dulled any sense of honor she might've felt and left a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She listened to them talk. She watched them bid goodbye. She watched Edward turn and run off as if he never intended to come back, and she kept her face tightly controlled as the colonel turned back to the car and got back in and gave the order to drive to the Waagu District without a word as to what just happened. Another second ticked loudly away in her mind. The flavor of wrongness grew sharper on her tongue as she silently complied and not a word was spoken as they rode, neither wishing to voice the thoughts on their minds.

This was not something they would come back from. One way or another.

Even if the colonel managed to walk away from a fight against a monster that nobody knew how to destroy, the consequences would be too far reaching to come back from. Life was over. The pendulum in her mind swung again, counting another second away in their lives.

They parked in silence, a kilometer or so away from the fuhrer's mansion, behind a store that was closed and dark for the night. The silence continued as they walked the rest of the way, each footstep deafening as it stole another moment, another piece of her life and her heart felt like it stopped beating and her mind recoiled each time her foot hit the ground.

It flashed briefly through her mind to ask to keep walking, to not stop, even once they'd reached the fuhrer's mansion, to keep going and to run far from all of this. She'd known from the time she chose to follow this man that the game they played would be dangerous, that there would be losses and gains and she'd been ready from the start to give her life if necessary to protect him while he reached for the stars.

But everything had changed. The dreams had been shelved, never to be taken down again, that vague promise of 'someday' taken away from them, and the cost had risen to become the very reason she had started following this man.

He was not a cost she was willing to pay.

Walking away was not anything he would ever do, she knew, and she would never ask it of him, so she quietly and faithfully walked beside him, counting each footstep as it rattled against her heart until they reached the walls behind the estate, and they stopped, staring up at the house that was the wall to their path, that unbreachable block that stopped everything and took it all away from them.

They stood like that, utterly quiet, for the longest and shortest minute of Riza's life, silently trying to say everything they'd never said, never been _able_ to say. Fear wrapped around her like a serpent and coiled around her, slowly draining the life from her, and she heard that countdown, that loud, awful, and echoing countdown in her head tick louder...

"This is where we part."

...and then stop with a deafening silence and somewhere, distantly, she could hear the steady tone in a hospital as a heart flatlined.

A pause, then she turned to him. "Then I shall see you when you come back, sir," she replied steadily. _You _will_ come back._

He frowned slightly, then turned to face her. The look on his face ripped the air from her lungs. "Lieutenant, you're aware tha-"

"With all due respect, sir," she interrupted, tone a bit tighter and sharper than she'd intended, and she took a breath to calm herself, "I'd rather you didn't say that."

His lips quirked into a smile slightly and he put his hands on her shoulders, studying her face, and she didn't need to ask what he was thinking to see it in those cool steel gray eyes. After a second, he started to lean in, and she could feel his breath against her face, cold and resigned as if he were already a dead man trying to say 'I'm sorry'.

She lifted a finger and pressed it lightly against his lips, stopping them from meeting hers. He looked at her questioningly, his brows knitted together slightly in an expression of consternation. "Don't," she said softly, feeling the familiar salt-sting of tears at the corners of her eyes. "Anything you say or do is going to feel like a goodbye."

He didn't reply to that right away, his expression softening as he drew back and let go of her. "I'll see you when this is through then," he said, his voice hushed and more expressive with just that one sentence than she'd heard it in a long time.

She nodded slightly with the ghosts of a heartbroken smile on her face, then suddenly reached up and kissed him lightly, just the barest brush of her lips against his. She lingered only a moment, then pulled back before he could react to catch her up tightly.

He blinked in surprise, as caught off-guard by her actions as she was, then smiled faintly. "I thought you didn't want a goodbye?"

"That was for luck, sir."

Words passed without a sound between them, then they turned from each other and walked away, each to where they needed to go for this final fight on their journey together, and all Riza could feel was the warm sensation of his lips on hers and all she could hear was the hiss of static in her mind as the world came to an end.


End file.
